Congressional Republicans want answers about how the current Supreme Court stay of the Clean Power Plan will affect the rule’s deadlines, and they want them now. A total of 112 lawmakers on Thursday wrote a letter to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy demanding information on how the deadlines in the rule will be shifted if the stay is lifted. “If ambiguity here drives states and stakeholders to meet all CPP compliance deadlines anyway, then the Court’s action will be meaningless,” said the group, led by Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas).
The lawsuit against the Clean Power Plan, which requires states to develop action plans to meet federally set emissions reduction goals, features more than half the states, along with more than 100 interest groups, utilities, companies, and trade organizations. In February, having been denied a stay of the rule by an appeals court, the group took their case to the Supreme Court; in an unprecedented action, the high court ruled 5-4 in favor of suspending EPA implementation of the rule. It was one of Justice Antonin Scalia’s last decisions before his death.
Any implementation deadlines that pass while the stay in place will now be delayed. This fact is not contested, but the EPA has been under increasing pressure to state definitively that milestones that hit after the litigation concludes will also be pushed back, or tolled – assuming the Clean Power Plan survives.
It is agreed that certainly the first and possibly the second deadlines in the rule, set for September 2016 and September 2018, both relating to submission of state plans, will be pushed back, as they will pass while the rule is under the stay. However, the first compliance deadline is not until 2022. The case against the rule is expected to be decided in late 2017 or 2018, and proponents of the Clean Power Plan argue that if the stay were lifted at that time states would have plenty of time to meet their compliance obligations.
McCarthy has skirted questions about the deadlines, telling the House Energy and Commerce Committee in March that “we assume that the courts will make that judgment over time or will leave that to EPA to make their own judgment.”
That is not an acceptable response, according to the GOP lawmakers. “[W]e seek clarification to ensure that your statements do not result in states and other stakeholders expending scarce resources to unnecessarily comply with the CPP’s deadlines. It is our belief that such actions would undermine the very purpose of the Court’s orders,” their letter says.
